African Slave Descendants Eke Out Living in Remote Mexico Enclaves : History: Smithsonian photographs explore a legacy that stretches back to the 1520s. The exhibit will come to Los Angeles in July.

Sitting in an empty doorway, a barefoot little boy gingerly clutches a baby bottle in one hand and a tortilla in the other. Light filters in from a window high above, creating shadows that accentuate his smallness as he relaxes on a step, contemplating his surroundings.

Five years ago, former fashion photographer Tony Gleaton traveled to the town of El Ciruelo, the home of this little boy, in the state of Oaxaca in Mexico. It is one of several small West Coast villages in the region south of Acapulco known as Costa Chica. Interested in photographing people he considered living outside conventional society, Gleaton has returned many times to photograph the “Costenos,” the descendants of African slaves living in this part of Mexico.

An exhibition of 52 black-and-white photographs, titled “Africa’s Legacy in Mexico: Photographs by Tony Gleaton,” examines the little-known African experience in present-day Mexico. The exhibit is being circulated nationally by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Service.

“Black people in Mexico?” asks Miriam Jimenez Roman, a sociologist and curator of special programs at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “The looks of amazement and disbelief on the faces of first-time viewers of Tony Gleaton’s photographs are eloquent testimony to the significance of these images, which force us to rethink many of our preconceptions, not only about our southern neighbor, but more generally about issues such as race, ethnicity, culture and national identity.”

The history of African people in Mexico began as early as the 1520s when the Spanish first brought them to this hemisphere as slaves. From the 16th Century on, indigenous populations of Mexico had been decimated by the importation of European diseases; African slaves provided the labor to build the Spanish colonial empire. Slaves worked throughout Mexico--in silver mines, textile factories, sugar plantations, cattle ranches and households.

“In the 16th Century, New Spain--as Mexico was then called-- probably had more enslaved Africans than any other colony in the Western Hemisphere,” says Colin A. Palmer, professor of history at the University of North Carolina. Palmer is author of “Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570-1650.”

At one time, Mexico held more than 200,000 slaves--a conservative number, according to many scholars. Slavery endured for a 300-year period until 1829, when it was abolished there.

Mexico also has a long history of slave rebellion and resistance. As early as 1537--the date of the first slave conspiracy--African people in Mexico protested their situation.

“Black resistance occupies a special place in Mexico’s revolutionary tradition,” Palmer continues. “It is a tradition that is a source of pride for many Mexicans.”

Slaves who escaped and fled to remote regions of Mexico were called “maroons” and were eventually given their freedom. One of the Americas’ earliest and most well-known of these maroon populations is found today in the isolated mountain town of Yanga, in the state of Veracruz, on Mexico’s Gulf Coast.

Like the people of Yanga, the Costenos of Costa Chica and other descendants of African slaves live primarily in isolated enclaves on the southwest coast in the states of Oaxaca and Guerrero, and in Veracruz. Historians say that until recently, these people have been largely ignored by mainstream Mexican society, in one sense due to the remoteness of their villages, and in another, due to a general reluctance on the part of many Mexicans to acknowledge the African people’s unique history and ongoing presence in Mexico.

“Mexico’s African presence has been relegated to an obscured slave past, pushed aside in the interest of a national identity based on a mixture of indigenous and European cultures-- el mestizaje , the Schomburg Center’s Jimenez Roman says. “For all intents and purposes, the biological, cultural and material contributions of more than 200,000 Africans and their descendants to the formation of Mexican society do not figure in the equation at all.”

But the influence of African people can be witnessed throughout Mexico. “Although strongest in black enclaves like Costa Chica, the African presence pervades Mexican culture,” says Luz Maria Martinez Montiel, chief researcher of the Afro-American project at the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico. “In story and legend, music and dance, proverb and song--the legacy of Africa touches the life of every Mexican.”

Gleaton’s photographs are not wistful, charming representations of the Costenos. Rather, they focus on the everyday realities of the people, many of whom live in poverty--a barbershop scene in which a young boy is prepared for a haircut, a little girl sitting on a bed in her grandmother’s house, a fisherman with a net slung over his shoulder, and a father and son embracing.

Evident at once is the sense of mutual respect Gleaton worked so hard to achieve since he began photographing the people of the little fishing villages. Men, women and children look proudly into his camera lenses.

The pictures have been likened to those of one of Mexico’s greatest photographers, the late Manuel Alvarez Bravo. “The photographs that I create are as much an effort to define my own life, with its heritage encompassing Africa and Europe, as an endeavor to throw open the discourse on the broader aspects of the mestizaje --the ‘assimilation’ of Asians, Africans and Europeans with indigenous Americans,” Gleaton says.

“The reasons I started this project were much more naive and self-serving than the reasons I had for continuing it,” he adds. “When I first arrived (in Mexico), I was seeking something, and I guess it was myself.”

The exhibit will appear at Fresno City College in Fresno March 13-April 25, at the San Francisco African-American Museum May 22-July 4, and at the California Afro-American Museum in Exposition Park in Los Angeles from July 24 to Nov. 7.